The Draft: How The Resisters Fare

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THE DRAFT

The food is very good, much better than the food that I paid for at the University of Chicago. The beds are clean, and you are given a change of linen once a week. You can change your underwear and socks daily if you're the fastidious sort. A lot of hardened cons are, strange to relate.

Except for the last sentence, Terry Sullivan, 30, could have been writing home about graduate school. Instead, his words appeared in a recent issue of Win, a magazine devoted to the Nonviolent Movement against the Viet Nam war. Sullivan's observations were intended to reassure fledgling draft resisters, to tell them that the ordeal of prison is not as terrifying as it seems. A draft resister who spent ten months at Danbury Correctional Institution in Connecticut, Sullivan was released a year ago. He recommends prison as "a great experience—you'll love it."

At present, almost 800 draft resisters and evaders are locked up in federal prisons throughout the country.* Whether they opposed war in general or the Viet Nam war in particular, whether they burned their draft cards or simply refused to go, each was convicted under the same clause of the Selective Service Act. Yet sentences vary enormously, depending upon the attitudes of the federal district judges who hear the cases. Some defendants are put on probation and will probably never go to prison at all; others draw the maximum sentence of five years and a $10,000 fine. Last year the average sentence was 32.1 months.

Railroad Presidents. The conditions of imprisonment vary just as widely. The Government tries to put each resister into the federal prison in his area, and also takes into account his age and education when assigning him. College Dropout Sullivan notes that at Danbury, which is known as the country club of federal prisons, he had the company of "a couple of lawyers, at least one doctor and three railroad presidents." In Allenwood, Pa., resisters make up almost half the prison population of 300. But elsewhere they are a minority among bootleggers, forgers and robbers. A few have even been tossed in with murderers and other hardened criminals at such maximum-security prisons as Leavenworth.

A University of Nebraska graduate who put in a two-year stretch at Leavenworth says: "The guards were the dumbest, most conservative s.o.b.s I've ever seen, but they were not half as bad as the other prisoners. It seemed like the two most despised groups were the C.O.s and the sexual perverts." For most of the resisters, the biggest enemies are boredom, lack of privacy, separation from friends and loved ones, and petty harassment by guards. They work as prison-library clerks, auto-shop mechanics, gardeners, dishwashers or launderers. Some of them find the repressive atmosphere of prison just one more reflection of an authoritarian society outside the walls.